This has been a year of roller coaster ups and downs. Many tender moments and tiny delights in my life. Many heart-wrenching miseries in the larger world, some of them well-funded by our own tax dollars. I’m tempted to elaborate on this, but cannot summon the energy because I am enduring day four of my first-ever bout with covid. This bout did its best to ruin our holidays and we’re still desperately hoping it didn’t infect any of our loved ones. (Sad and guilt-sodden update, it did infect our loved ones.)

Thank goodness for the restorative, mind-stretching, soul-rejuvenating power of books. Here’s a short list of my standout reads from the last 12 months. (Many more on my Goodreads running tally, necessary because I’m not great at remembering titles.) And no, once again I haven’t included poetry books. I’d have to take a week off from actual work to list all my favorites this year, or any year.

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NONFICTION

Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language by Amanda Montell. Late one night I was in bed reading Amanda Montell’s wonderful book. I often read well into the quiet hours while my sleeps-through-anything spouse snoozes next to me. Until I got to an intriguing and (at 1 am, hilarious) passage quoting UPenn linguist Mark Liberman. I giggled so much that I woke the nonmobile, older, rural male who’d been faintly snoring. The next morning he diplomatically claimed he didn’t recall me calling him Norm. Here’s that passage:

“For decades, linguists have agreed that young, urban females tend to be our linguistic innovators. As South Korea is to beauty products and Silicon Valley is to apps, women in their teens, twenties, and thirties create–and/or incubate–future language trends… ‘It’s generally pretty well known that if you identify a sound change in progress, then young people will be leading old people, and women tend to be maybe half a generation ahead of males,’ Liberman says. (Fun fact: linguists have also determined that the least innovative language users are nonmobile, older, rural male, which they’ve majestically given the acronym ‘NORMs.’)” 

Wilding: Returning Nature to a British Farm by Isabella Tree.  This is a deeply lived and well-researched marvel of a book. It overlaps with quite a few other books I’ve read in the last decade, yet it is singular in its approach and offers all sorts of insights. Here are a few: “They estimate that if organic matter in the world’s farmed soils was increased by as little as 1.6 per cent, the problem of climate change would be solved.” Plus quite logical evidence that grazing animals are healthier themselves and for the planet, including lower methane emissions, when animals graze on common plants and herbs naturally growing in biodiverse pastures. And this,

“Children who spent time in green spaces between the ages of seven and twelve tend to think of nature as magical. As adults they are the people most likely to be indignant about lack of nature protection, while those who have had no such experience tend to regard nature as hostile or irrelevant and are indifferent to its loss. By expurgating nature from children’s lives we are depriving the environment of its champions for the future.”    

In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face To Face With The Idea of an Afterlife by Sebastian Junger. The author regularly put his life on the line as a war reporter. But he was at home with his family when he nearly died. That’s when Junger, an atheist, was visited by his dead father. The experience moved the author to go on a scientific, philosophical, and personal examination of what happens after we die. He writes, “Every object is a miracle compared to nothingness and every moment an infinity when correctly understood to be all we’ll ever get.”

The Universe in 100 Colors: Weird and Wondrous Colors from Science and Nature by Tyler Thrasher  The images, book design, and succinct passages for each color are all beautifully done. This is one of those books that inspired me to say to whoever was in the room, “You’ve got to hear this” before reading aloud a paragraph or two about Pompeian Red, Earth Aurora Green, Yinmn Blue, or Cystoseira Tamariscifolia. Any book that amplifies how amazing our world is, is a book worth savoring.

The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist by Marcus Rediker. This book intersects with all sorts of my fascinations including pacificism, living up to one’s values, and most particularly how to to tilt history toward greater compassion. I was so taken with Benjamin Lay that I took copious notes while reading in hopes of including it in an essay that I have not (yet) written. Benjamin Lay lived as moral a life as he could, for example refusing to eat animals, ride animals, or tolerate their abuse. Well before other more well-known abolitionists, he did his best to shame those who enslaved people. He convinced his friend Benjamin Franklin to publish his book, one of the first books demanding abolition. He may well have also been the first to make public protest a form of performance art.

“Benjamin was thrice an outsider to mainstream society, as a religious radical, an abolitionist, and a dwarf. His experience as a little person, coupled with commitment of universal love to all peoples, turned compassion into active solidarity. Benjamin’s life as a dwarf was thus another key to his radicalism—a deep source of his empathy with enslaved and other poor people, with animals, and with all of the natural world.”

World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments by Aimee Nexhukumatathil.  This book is made up of beautifully written essays on the many ways nature has shaped the author’s life and outlook. I was so entranced by one passage that I brought it up for weeks any time I encountered someone I hadn’t already told. Here it is:

“There’s a spot over Lake Superior where migrating butterflies veer sharply. No one understood why they made such a quick turn at that specific place until a geologist finally made the connection: a mountain rose out of the water in that exact location thousands of years ago. These butterflies and their offspring can still remember a mass they’ve never seen.”       

The whole book is a marvel. Here’s one more quick excerpt:

“I know I will search for fireflies all the rest of my days, even though they dwindle a little bit more each year. I can’t help it. They blink on and off, a lime glow to the summer night air, as if to say: I am still here, you are still here, I am still here, you are still here, I am, you are, over and over again. Perhaps I can will it to be true. Perhaps I can keep those summer nights with my family inside an empty jam jar, with holes poked in the lid, a twig and a few strands of grass tucked inside. And for those unimaginable nights in the future, when I know I’ll miss my mother the most, I will let that jar’s sweet glow serve as a night-light to cool and cut the air for me.”

Crafting A Better World: Inspiration and DIY Projects for Craftivists by Diana Weymar.  I’ve been following the author’s Tiny Pricks Project, which uses the delicate art of embroidery to stitch the most outrageous political quotes. Even when we vote, march, volunteer, and donate it’s easy to feel hopeless. This (like Craftivist books I’ve previously recommended) inspires us to action through creativity. The author has collected projects and ideas from activists including Guerilla Girls, Roz Chast, and Gisele Fetterman. When the outrages become more audacious, our art and our play need to be more audacious too!

The Comfort of Crows by Margaret Renkl.  This was a surprise gift from a friend (thank you Martha!) which made each page sweeter. Renkl mixes science and her own life in seamlessly written essays that can’t help but lure readers outside to pay closer attention to all the life that’s going on around them. She writes, “I stand at the window looking out, trying to remember the truths that nature always brings home. That what lies before me is not all there is. That time is ever passing, and not only when I notice. That strife and pain are no more unexpected than pleasure and joy. That merely by breathing I belong to the eternal.”  She doesn’t shy away from the very damning changes imposed on the world by industrialized countries. She lives quietly and does what she can and urges us to do the same, eyes open. Here’s another glimpse:

“Even now, with the natural world in so much trouble—even now, with the patterns of my daily life changing in ways I don’t always welcome or understand—radiant things are bursting forth in the darkest places, in the smallest nooks and deepest cracks of the hidden world. I mean to keep looking every single day until I find them.”

Extreme Birds: The World’s Most Extraordinary and Bizarre Birds by Dominic Couzens. We’ve gotten ever more bird-obsessed since the beginning of lockdown. Some blame goes to the marvelous Merlin Bird ID app from the Cornell Lab, a must for anyone curious about the birds they’re hearing. My husband maintains five different feeders plus, ahem, grain and raw peanuts on the ground for visitors that include many ducks and one pheasant we’ve named Edwin. Back to the book at hand. This volume is arranged in categories like Longest Legs and Widest Wingspan, but those are just a excuse to entice anyone from age 8 to 108. The photos are incredible and each two-page spread includes just enough text to leave you eager to learn more.  

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NONFICTION-MEMOIR

Another Word for Love by Carvell Wallace.  Wallace is a man whose soul is both stirred and stirring. He gives us the forward motion of memoir through the decades while also pausing to let us muse with him over life-sized unanswerable questions. In one gorgeously written passage he begins with a picture of his grandparents and takes us with him as he considers facial characteristics passed down through the family, imagines his fourth great-grandmother as a young woman gazing at the stars, offers her a vision of his children with their “bubbling anarchy of tender ages, their faces unbroken by grief and exhaustion…” and ends with his own struggle to be “far enough away to understand and close enough to grieve.”

Here’s another passage that sings with wisdom:

“To be a man as I learned it was to be contained, held within, under control. Unripped and unbroken. Everything I learned about the body early on was about control and containment. Men were not to leak or make too much noise or express too much or lose a grip on anything. Not on your body. Not on anyone else’s. This makes the world a fundamentally terrifying and destabilizing place for men because what the earth is, at its spiritual core, is a thing uncontained. It is liquid and explosive, the chaos of leaves and rivers, mountains of lava, fecund and overflowing.

To be a man as manhood was taught to me is to be fiercely at odds with the earth, which is to say it is fiercely at odds with the divine. It is to be in battle with the divine because to be a man is to be in control and the divine is the complete opposite of control. This is why men are so violent and angry and destructive to ourselves and to you and to the world. We teach each other to hate what we cannot control, and nothing, literally nothing, can be truly controlled.

Look at the earth, how it insists itself upon our buildings and shopping malls and golf courses and hiking trails. Look at how we have tried for centuries to overwhelm the earth and instead the earth has overwhelmed us, calmly, innocently, and with all the tender savagery of a stream running down a gentle slope. What is a body for in the midst of that kind of simple and inevitable passing?” 

We Will Be Jaguars : A Memoir of My People by Nemonte Nenquimo. This is powerful, essential reading. The author tells of her family, her entire people, who are threatened by the ongoing encroachment of Big Oil. What can tribal people do when facing extinction of their way of life and the ecosystems they have long upheld? Seems unimaginable when up against global economic interests and the will of governments, abetted by missionaries and the corrosive effects of commerce. Yet Nenquimo dreamed the way forward. This is not only an account of deep suffering. It is also one of stories, dreams, love, and tremendous victory.

Here’s a quote from one of the final chapters, when the author is in a courtroom standoff.

“I turned my gaze to the judges and realized that if they were to see us, to truly see us, then we must also see them. Not as enemies, not as heartless judges, not as caricatures of conquest but rather as people, like us, capable of love and hate, of joy and grief. As souls that were here on this earth in these bodies for just a momentary flash. Maybe if we showed them that we were capable of seeing them, then they would see us, hear us, learn from us? … Maybe violence is born in the chasms between us, within us? Maybe the conquest, at its root, has always been about that chasm, a pain so lonely, so unbearable, so spiritually numbing that violence becomes the only path, the narrow trail to being human, to feeling something, anything.”

Something In The Woods Loves You by Jarod K. Anderson. One night I went to bed early with this book, meaning to read a chapter or two. I ended up reading the whole book. My lord, do I ever feel understood, even if what I’ve been through is nothing approaching Jarod’s experience. His meaning-making from time in nature is, as I expected, truly inspiring. So too his unexpected meaning-making out of the suicidal impulse itself. There I was sitting up in a tiny circle of lamplight in my dark room at midnight circling wise words about how a culture without whimsy is dangerous and how the air is charged with a kind of aliveness in the presence of a wild animal, wrapped up completely in his words.

A few weeks earlier I’d sent a copy of Something In The Woods Loves You to a dear friend who is enduring another bout of severe depression. I meant to read a library copy first, to assure myself she might find it helpful, as I didn’t want to impose yet another well-meaning “do this and you’ll feel better” sort of gift. My library copy didn’t come in week after week, so I finally had this sent to her home sight unseen out of sheer trust in Jarod after loving his poetry for so long. Thankfully she enjoy reading it. The copy I sat up half the night reading? It was her gift to me. It’s that good.

Lights on a Ground of Darkness: An Evocation of a Place and Time by Ted Kooser. Beautiful writing, as one might expect in a poet’s memoir. This short (72 pages!) memoir evokes a specific Midwestern time and place, all the more poignant for its distance from today. Here’s a passage about his elderly father visiting a relative dying in a nursing home.

“Now, as he rushes through people calling and calling to him, his heart tapping in his ears, he feels how frail and light he may soon become. He wants more gravity, he wants to hold himself down, to keep himself together for a little longer, to cherish the softening muscles wrapped like weights around his bones. How little this skull of thin, translucent bone must weigh. How fragile and infirm (and yet how precious to him) are its tiny sutures, the pearly, polished sockets for the eyes.

He stares past the girl painting her nails at the information desk, past the big windows in the visiting room that open upon beds of white petunias drooping in the heat, past the empty iron benches in the neatly mown grass. The cornfield looks as if it were made of electricity. It has suddenly come upon him that he is seventy years old and incapable of walking in any other direction that straight into the future. Flowered sport shirt; thin, spotted arms.” 

They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl’s Fight for Freedom by Ahed Tamimi. The long struggle of the Palestinian people is made vivid through the author’s experiences as her close-knit family and village stand up (with all they have — songs, chants, and rocks) to the brutality of occupying Israelis. It’s even more heartbreaking to recognize this book was published before the current ongoing genocide began. I read this memoir earlier this week during long afternoon while coughing and shivering with covid. That night her stories came alive in my dreams. Maybe because Ahed is so determined and brave, those dreams were not nightmares. 

Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes by Chantha Nguon. The author shares her experiences as a Cambodian refugee who lost her home, her family, her country in the horrors of the Pol Pot regime. She writes, “When you must flee and can carry only one thing, what will it be? What single seed from your old life will be the most useful in helping you sow a new one?” Nguon relies on her mother’s “slow noodles” approach to healing and to cooking, one that prioritizes time and care over expediency. This a testament to the power of culinary heritage to spark the author’s hope for an authentic life (and includes 20 Khmer recipes). Here’s a taste of her words. “But if there’s one thing I learned from my mother, it’s that losing everything is not the end of the story. She taught me that lost civilizations can be rebuilt from zero, even if the task will require many generations of work.” 

The Body Is A Doorway: A Journey Beyond Healing, Hope, and the Human by Sophie Strand. I was grateful to get an arc of this book, due out in early March. Sophie Strand senses and understands in ways more whole, more alive, than most writers I have encountered in my decades as an avid reader. She brings this full beingness to all her work and this book is a standout. The Body Is A Doorway has widened and deepened the way I see my own health challenges. Here’s a passage from one of the closing chapters:

“How can we be well inside of an Earth we are actively harming?.. I want to suggest that we are all haunted. Not by flashbacks and memories. But by an imaginary idea of wholeness. By the idea that there is a normal body that renders our body deviant. That there is another version of us — a healthy version… That we must spend our every waking hour, our hard-earned money, our dedicated spiritual and physical focus, striving toward this other us…

For so long I’d viewed comfort and relaxation and ease as the goals that medical and psychological treatment were supposed to provide… I learned that we were supposed to create safe spaces and healthy boundaries…

Trauma does not belong to an individual. It is a web. It is not an object that can be removed. Your body’s innate ability to dance with harm and with discomfort is not always a problem. It is a relational tactic. A nonconsensual opening to both the good and the bad, the human and the nonhuman. .. I finally stopped defending the doorway of my own body. .Let it in. The love. The wonder. The pain. The uncertainty.”

Here’s another bit to give you a sense of her work:

“Every story, like every human body, is an ecosystem of other stories: the virus author that ‘taught’ us mammals how to develop wombs, the ancient ecological pressures that molded us into multicellularity, our pulsing microbiome, our fungi-dusted skin, our metabolic reciprocity with every substance we breathe and drink and eat. Every recombinatory miracle of genetics gave birth not to an individual on a hero’s journey, but to a biodiversity of competing and converging aliveness.”

Breaking Through: My Life in Science  by Katalin Karikó.  Breaking Through begins as a vivid coming-of-age story in postwar Hungary, showing us how Dr. Karikó developed the resilience and unquenchable curiosity that led to her remarkable breakthroughs. She takes us along through significant career drawbacks that would have daunted most other scientists. Her explanations of the work leading to mRNA is fascinating. She let her own experience demonstrate how innovation is easily stifled in our money and power-focused institutions. I also appreciate what this brave woman is doing for healthcare both now and for our collective futures.

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FICTION

There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak  In this beautifully written and brilliant novel, the author does with water what Richard Power did with trees – science, history, art, and meaning flow through the underlying theme of water. She writes, “In this land where the stones are ancient and the stories are spoken but rarely written down, it is the rivers that govern the days of our lives. Many kings have come and many kings have gone, and God knows most were ruthless, but here in Mesopotamia, my love, never forget the only true ruler is water.” I can’t wait to read her other books.

Sandwich by Catherine Newman. I would gladly read about everything this family does through the eyes of the main character. Rocky is my kind of wry bittersweet. She and I share the same neuroses, our grown kids are similarly brilliant and funny (even if she has a too-perfect-to-be-true spouse). And I appreciate how well she inserts candid humor into scenes.

Here’s how she describes being examined by a doctor on a the paper-covered exam table:
“I sit up so I could feel more like a human woman than like a pile of old ham slices wrapped in deli paper.”

After Rocky’s mother is taken to the hospital, daughter Willa remonstrates her grandmother:
“I told you to drink something!” Willa says, because her genetic inheritance includes scolding the people you’re worried about.” 

The God Of The Woods by Liz Moore. This immersive, character-rich mystery centers on class divides with all its embedded cruelties. I don’t read many mysteries, so my perspective may be limited, but I definitely did not see it ending the way it did — all the more satisfying.   

By Any Other Name by Jodi Picoult. Why, when I read 100+ books a year, haven’t I read Jody Picoult’s tremendously popular books? I don’t have any idea. Maybe, subconsciously, I heard her books described (or dismissed) too many times as beach reads, as a typical airport fiction, as chick lit. To me, those dismissals are the fire burning under this wow of a novel.

By Any Other Name is a deeply researched and compelling work that manages to encompass centuries-long misogyny and chronic literary snobbishness in parallel stories—current day Melina Green and sixteenth century Emilia Bassano. Bassano’s story is the stronger of the two and could have been the standalone tale, but I see the need for the current story as a mirror. Probably as a mirror to readers like me who weren’t aware they dismiss too easily. I will never see Shakespeare’s name again without thinking of this book

Night Wherever We Go by Tracey Rose Peyton  This is an incredible debut novel packed with humanity and its ugly failings. The author effortlessly lets her readers into the lives of these the enslaved women. And lets us feel the pull of relationship with the beyond-human in passages that stood out for me, like these:

“Some feet ahead, she spotted a chaste tree, its bright purple flowers just beginning to open. She wandered over to it, sensing some vibration calling to her. An unbelievable phenomenon she realized whenever she tried to describe it, but she had known it all her life–this ability to hear plants and trees whispering to her, offering her help.”

“We wanted to be inside the prayer and song, the deep vibration and sweaty fist of it, but couldn’t muster any of the necessary stuff to get up inside it. Some of us understood that these were relationships one remade over and over again. All the time, one was seeking alignment with God, with her Dead, with the trees and animals alike. All these relationships required sun and tending to, but the youngest among us didn’t understand the back-and-forth.”

“She picked up a stick and carried it low, scraping a trail in the dirt. A circle, a pointed arrow, a series of linked curlicues. She was pointing souls now. A whole army of them to nest inside the four walls. And she hoped by the time she got there, a war would be happening between her saints and his. She crossed herself and spun, left then right, as if she was trying to reach some hinge in the air, unlatching some hidden thing where all the otherworldly help could pour out of.” 

Shy Creatures by Clare Chambers. It is a reader’s joy to start a book by an author new to her and realize, within a few pages, she’s found another author to love. This is an absorbing and deftly written novel that maintains its excellence all the way through to an unexpectedly redemptive ending. I will be hustling to read Clare Chambers’ other works.

Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips. This is a complex, brutal, and powerfully written work set in the Civil War era. The history itself is fascinating. I was particularly drawn to the character Dearbhla. Night Watch has much to say about trauma and its aftereffects both on individuals and a time period. (For those who appreciate advance warnings, there is a great deal of suffering in these pages.)

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng. This is an essential book for our times. Today’s angry voices denouncing books and the study of history and diversity itself have gotten their way in Celeste Ng’s novel. In some unnamed near-future, economic strife and simmering anti-Asian racism is used to justify the shock doctrine-like creation of a sweeping new law called PACT: Preserving American Culture and Traditions. Free access to books and music is gone. History is censored. People are rewarded for informing on “troublemakers.” The law also prevents the spread of “un-American views” by permanently removing children from families thought to be sympathetic to Asian countries or from parents thought to harbor un-patriotic opinions, even thought to doubt the benefit of PACT itself. In the potentially not-far-off world of Our Missing Hearts we come to know a linguist and poet who have a child named Bird. We come to see the unflagging heroism of librarians. We feel the power of etymology, and folktales, and of symbols that lift from poetry into larger purpose.

Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson. This is a fresh and clever take on the mystery genre (at least in my admittedly limited experience). The narrator’s career centers around teaching others about the craft of writing mysteries, although he has not published one himself. Lots of asides to the reader about rules of mystery writing, very meta, even if a bit murder-y for my taste. I was happy to discover this is the first book in a series of three.

The Golden Spoon by Jessa Maxwell. This is a charming, character focused mystery with a resoundingly positive ending. (Well, not positive for some of them.) I found it a delightful retreat from a chaotic world and I recommend it to anyone needing their own 288 pages of sweet as well as savory escapism.

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You know my yearly book lists are a poorly veiled attempt to hear about your favorite reads. Please comment with some titles you love.